I understand!
At the peninsula's outpost, letters were pouring in by boats. By boats!
It would be understandable if something else, like food and fresh water donations during the monsoon season, poured in from the rest of the nation. After all, people from this part of a tropical country were used to big waves and raging floods. Their homes were built not only to withstand the annual typhoons but to be quickly rebuilt in case of unavoidable collapse due to excessive five-meter-high flooding, sometimes for days. Nature was scary, but it was a part of their mundane lives. Therefore, food and fresh water donations were also expected in life. But this time, they were letters — hand-written letters packing the dock. That was something that the villagers on this medium-sized fishing peninsula in Vietnam would never fathom.
Nhân complained about the last two delivery batches with soaked letters in the bottom of the hemp bags. “How could I make the addresses to sort them out if they’re soaking wet and disintegrating in my hands, man? Put the bags onto something. Your boats are always wet. C’mon, this is paper, man!” - Nhân was yelling at the young messenger. The youngster was a dark-skinned, shirtless teenager running a single-engined delivery boat for quick cash between the peninsula and its surrounding islands.
Nhân took care of the outpost up the road from the dock. Usually, he’d be clinking his keychain to open the outpost’s sole wooden door at 7 AM. He’d then open the weathered green windows with a green metal rod barricade on the same window frame. It seemed excessive for such a thick metal barricade, but that was how Nhân's uncle, the old village's mailman many years ago, built it for safety.
Nhân was a skinny guy in his early 30s, wore a stained red cap, and always had a Hero cigarette in his mouth. He worked in his humble 6 square meter office- the small outpost station with a rusty corrugated roof built slanted to drain rainwater. Usually, he’d be sorting out physical goods in woven plastic bags, cartons, or cheap wood crates, preparing them to be delivered. After sorting, he'd load them onto his weathered white Lambro 550 and drive to each parcel’s final destination. Nhân was a mailman but also took up extra local delivery jobs as needed, especially during quieter days. He got paid by the village’s municipal office with an artificially low daily rate plus a large bag of rice every month, which meant the extra jobs sometimes paid him way more than his main gig.
He was diligent at work but also at complaining about everything in his life. Everything except his brown mud dog Láo. This dog was his best friend and a diligent second-hand smoker. So naturally, Láo followed Nhân everywhere, even to work. Láo was there, rainy or sunny. Work sometimes was so slow that without Láo, Nhân would think he might die of boredom. Nhân would never consider one day, his good old outpost, in yellow with a white anti-fungal paint line across the bottom of its four outside walls, would take in just so many letters.
As he loaded another batch of the letter bags on a big wheelbarrow from the dock to the sorting table at the outpost, Láo ran ahead of him. He mumbled the morning away, “At this rate, I can't do this alone anymore. You gotta step up and load some for me, man.” Everyone and everything was a man to Nhân. “You eat, now you work. You start tomorrow, ok man?” He told Láo. With a half-burnt cigarette dangling between his dry lips, Nhân could barely catch a breath between his complaining. His tan honeycomb sandals tore a little more every day.
—
Five months ago, a massive wave of dead fish flooded the shore of this village. It happened almost overnight. The affected shoreline spanned not only this village alone but four nearby. That was a very long cove to see a sight of just dead, stinky fish upon more dead, smelly fish. People didn't understand why. As far as they knew, there were no official reports about oil leaks or natural disasters during the season. Yet, so many dead fish were seen in the helicopter's video, even when filmed in a tropical morning rain, people could see a glistening, thick silver line of fish carcasses on the beach instead of the usual light brown sand.
The government sent waves of young foot soldiers and navy crews, alongside volunteered locals, to clean up their shores and cook for the workforce. The area’s sea pollution level significantly affected a colossal corporation’s seafood production. The government was forced to intervene, and intervene fast! Ultimately, that turned out to be a good factor, or else the help wouldn't come as quickly as it did.
This news was on TV every day for about three weeks. Compared to just ten years ago, when power was scarce enough, some places in this village, like the outpost, would not have lightbulbs. TVs then were great but not necessary. However, the villagers had lately fashioned their households with decent TVs in recent years, all possible thanks to vast power lines arriving in the region. All the small warehouses and the main market stalls had glaring white LED bulbs. But considering how rarely they needed the outpost to function at night, it never required a shining bulb. That was until recently.
The villagers had never seen big boxy cameras and many reporters in their town. Nhân was one of many volunteered locals who cleaned up the beach. The mail outpost became a sleeping tent for the chief, while other soldiers would stay in large, dark green tents erected around clear grounds or crash at some locals’ homes. They set up more lightbulbs and electric lines because of that. Nhân said he couldn't eat fish for maybe another year after that. The stinkiness was probably still in his throat until much later. It was on the news the whole time. But after about three weeks and some odd days, the ASEAN football tournament began, sweeping all national spotlights and replacing the then-forgotten dead fish story. People moved on so quickly.
During those “spotlight" weeks, there was one particular night. As Nhân was locking up his micro-truck and left the key with the chief that stayed in his empty outpost, he whistled for Láo to come home with him. Pour Láo couldn't even stand the smell sometimes. He'd sniff and sometimes gag at the dead fish. He wouldn't eat them anymore after getting screamed at by his owner at the beginning of the first cleaning week. That night he kept looking out to shore rather than rushing home before Nhân's steps like usual. Láo finished his typical food, drank water, and fell asleep soundly. But Nhân couldn't sleep.
He could see down the hill from his tiny house’s window. The lighthouse where his friend Toàn lived and worked was on the far left of his vantage point. Closer was the yellow outpost, which recently got a shining single light bulb installed by the front yard, hooked on a tall plastic rod for the soldiers to gather and have dinner, spreading the food on some newspapers right on the ground. The chief joined his crew, and they seemed to talk about something hilarious. Or at least the soldiers laughed at the chief's joke like it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. It was late, but because they'd get a half-day off tomorrow after a long eight days of hard labor uninterrupted, the small group didn't just crash on their beds like usual. But closer to midnight, the people got quieter.
Soon, the yard was empty, and they turned off the blinding cold white light bulb. The outpost was just the same silhouette of darkness with the ground under the fragile sickle moonlight. Nhân was still awake. He lit another cigarette just because he was looking for nothing. Láo was sleeping next to his foot. At first, it was a blink. He thought it might be a weird glare from the cigarette's orange tip. But it wasn't. This light was faintly green. A slight blink of green light turned on, much like a flashlight. And then it was off. Was somebody patrolling the beach? Or maybe it was a reflection from the lighthouse - He wasn't sure. Twenty minutes later, it happened again. This time the blinking lights were just as bright. But it blinked slowly enough that Nhân couldn’t doubt its existence anymore. Slow, irregular blinks of deep green light from the same spot down the shore. Was it Morse code? Again, he wasn't sure. The light was blinking faintly, fading to dark and lighting up as slowly as someone’s sleeping breaths. Nhân decided to make his way down to the dock. Much to his surprise, Láo didn't wake up to the sounds of Nhân leaving the bed like usual. Nhân stroked his dog’s head lightly, petting his sticky back. He was still asleep soundly, and his breath was slower than the blinking light.
Nhân walked down the hill, a silver battery flashlight and a small kitchen knife in his back pocket. He wasn't sure what it was and couldn't be too careful. After all, it was way past midnight, with more strange people in town than ever. He didn't go on the dock but turned before that, walking down the sandy path. He approached the last stone step barefoot and went into an area that was only cleared of dead fish since yesterday afternoon. The sand's color, or any color, was grey with a hint of the blueish moonlight gleaming on the open sea. He realized the tides were way higher recently than five years ago, for instance.
The green flicking light still seemed so far away from shore. People would have to be on a boat to go that far at this hour. Nhân felt an uneasy wind stirring up all of a sudden. The kind of quiet wind, but it’d shake enough leaves to wake someone up in the middle of a silent night. What is its purpose, and who is it trying to communicate with?- Nhân failed to come up with a possible theory. He wondered for a split second that maybe the light was for him. But if it were, he wouldn’t be so lost like that.
The wind picked up more, and the green light slowly caught up with the wind’s speed. Nhân saw the tall palm trees behind him, flustered like a storm was coming despite a very calm night. He walked closer to the water, trying to make something from the flickering source. His sight glued on the green light. He stepped on something wet amid all the drier sand around. By then, the wind got so loud; it blew his hair all over. Nhân touched the bottom of his toe, and he realized it was slimy. He thought it might be another fish carcass that they left behind. Nhân picked up the tiny thing he stepped on: roundish, soft, slimy, and it ensembled an imperfect marble. He took out the flashlight and lit the marble in his hand. It was an oddly fresh fish eyeball covered in sand. Nhân could only see this transparent, bulging eye like this from a live or freshly caught fish. It was bizarre enough to see such a lonely, deserted fish eye on the beach, detached from a fish head, left alone that it was from an infamous extensive graveyard of fish for days then.
Not knowing what to do with the fish eye in his hand, Nhân turned off his flashlight and threw it back to the ocean - where it came from presumably. He paused and realized immediately that the green light had disappeared. He waited for it to return, sitting on the stinky sand beneath. He lit some cigarettes but forgot to smoke most of them. It never came back. He felt incredibly lonely, as if he went to a destined meeting just to find out that the person he'd supposed to meet just never showed up or had already left. They missed each other entirely, leaving such a longing ache for the unanswered.
Many nights after, he tried to stay up late and waited for the same green light. Unfortunately, it never resurfaced or gilded its reflection on the ocean’s midnight again.
—
Finally, there was one.
Many letters came to this peninsula recently, oddly without specific recipient names. Instead, they were all addressed to house numbers and road names, available in yellow books and public records that people could easily find.
According to the National Centre for Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting, a piece of developing national news just under two weeks ago talked extensively about the possibility that the peninsula and surrounding islands in this area might face disappearance due to a historically significant hurricane coming their way. All the villages in the dead fish incident from a while back would be directly under threat because they belonged to the same shore. The forecast was following a developing ocean storm from the Pacific Ocean. This coming Category 7 tropical depression could develop into a deadly hurricane. According to this gloomy prediction, its destruction could submerge most of the peninsula altogether. A gradual rise in temperature of the area, thus a rise in sea level, which began way before the hurricane, added to this cause.
This flooding might be one of the worst ones they'd ever known. A mandatory evacuation had been the talk of the town. Many speculations took place for if or when this might happen.
“And where will we go, man?” - Nhân complained to Toàn about this possible sudden change. He flickered his cigarette hand to rid the ash.
“I’ll call their bluff, to be honest with you" - Toàn spat on the ground and sipped his Foster beer. “They won't give us any money, and they want us to just move to the mainland? To where, Vũng Tàu? I won't leave my lighthouse for shit".
“The only people who don't take it seriously are on this land. Everyone else is dead worried about us. Didn't you see the news or read any of your letters? You got the most letters out of all of us. Damn, man, I'm tired of reading The LightHouse, Penin 1. Just cuz you got the fanciest address, m'kay?!”
Nhân made an amusing observation but ended up sounding like he was slightly jealous of Toàn’s popularity with letter writers. And Láo was asleep soundly on the concrete floor beneath their blue plastic table full of Foster beers and yellow deadly spicy Vietnamese beef jerky. The afternoon soon faded to dark.
The letters came from people who felt an incredible connection to this piece of sob story on the news. “The villagers face homelessness and immediate relocation,” “A refugee wave is coming to the mainland due to a historic storm this season."
Nhân didn't know how to take the letter that came this morning. It was the first one ever addressed to Mailman, Penin 1. A very vague person was compelled enough to write a letter to whoever that was this village’s mailman. This person explained that they understood what the mailman might be going through, losing hope and losing a home, that they were here to help with anything, and that they were sending love. While Toàn - the lighthouse guy - even had someone offering him a place to stay in District 8, although it came all the way from Saigon, and Toàn wouldn't even know how to get to Saigon. For them both, Saigon was so far, it might as well belong to fiction.
Compared to that, Nhân's sole letter was very modest, but he felt a strange familiarity reading someone's handwriting. Something was homey about that. It felt like he was hearing from a distant relative or a childhood friend, both of whom he’d lost touch with for so many years, and they finally found him in the end, that they'd be there to reassure help if he ever needed it.
After the talk, Nhân drove home from the lighthouse. He kept thinking about his letter the whole way home. Nhân imagined what the face of this person might look like. The writer mentioned that he was in his late twenties, and his dad had worked for the local post office his whole life. He would have loved to become a mailman, but the financial need was a constant worry for his family since he was born. So he'd become a salaryman in sales instead. He felt compelled to write to someone like Nhân to follow a national trend and send love this way. After signing his name, the man scribbled his telephone number to call after 5 pm, in case Nhân got relocated to his city.
They got home after dark and rolled on to bed soon after. Láo had been climbing up Nhân's single bed every night for the recent month - something Láo had never done since he was a puppy. He always preferred the ground, right next to Nhân's bed. Láo woke up way more in the middle of the night, jumped down and sniffed away everything in the house, then went back to bed. Since the green light night, Nhân hadn't slept that easy either. Something had corroded his good night’s sleep, bit by bit. He often thought to himself, questioning himself if that green light happened, if he went to the beach and stepped on that fish eye, or if it was just a weird dream that he remembered vividly.
Despite the strange events this year, Nhân didn't think much until the first forecasting news was broadcasted two weeks ago. After that, he kept waiting for something to happen. Then, this week with the letters, he wondered if what he'd been waiting for might be coming soon.
The morning came rather at a slow pace. The letters still came that day to the dock, but it was a different volume than last week. Nhân felt a slight relief from that.
“Guess you never had to step up, huh, Láo? You lucky man!”
In the afternoon, Nhân finished his glass of lukewarm jasmine tea before closing the outpost early. People gathered at the village’s municipal office to hear from the village's chief. Everyone got the same worrying face. In the courtyard, they set up a pair of tall speakers. The chief reached the podium with a stack of important-looking papers. Nhân stood so close to the front that he could glance at the red stamp marks, usually seen on government announcements.
“Hello, everyone! Thank you for being here. First, I want to say that we have been in constant communication with the mainland, and this will need everyone's utmost cooperation.”
The chief explained that per instructions from “the mainland," which meant the province, the village would undergo a mandatory evacuation this week. The first minute of his speech was met with loud murmurs in the crowd. People were yelling all their concerns out loud, ranging from their houses, gardens, stockpiles, storages, vehicles, and animals.
Láo was wagging his tail to all the noises and many people surrounding him. He thought it might be a party.
The chief seemed to understand why people might oppose this idea rather than seeing the severity of their fates. He calmly continued,
“To be honest, I asked the province’s head office. They said that our situation is dire. Relocating is our last resort. More detailed plans are in motion, how we'll move as groups and how we'll eat. If nothing changes, we will leave in two days. So I advise everyone to go home and start packing up. Pack light, and store the leftovers up high! It might not be as bad as the weatherman said, but I don't know. We don't know. If it turns out, in the end, to be better than expected, we will return in no time. If not, we'd be glad that we’d left.”
So it was final. The villagers were told to return tomorrow at around the same time to receive food stamps and hear more from the chief. Nhân looked at Láo running around to people he knew and wagged hello. Nhân whistled to Láo they needed to go. Worries clouded over his mind.
Nhân looked over and saw Toàn from afar. Toàn shrugged his thin shoulders and sighed visibly. They had nothing to discuss, so Nhân held his hand up to say bye. He headed to the local store, and a long line was already formed. Leaving or not, they’d still need to stock up. It was clear that most of his fellow villagers saw the idea of leaving their homes as foreign as going to America. They’d instead climb up their red china tiles on the roof and stay for days if flooding occurred. Stranded, but they’d rather be stranded at home.
Somehow, Nhân knew it was apparent that there would be no village anymore. He felt that. The thought devastated him so much that he forgot to light a cigarette while standing in line. When it got to his turn, a lot of stuff was already gone. He picked up some cigarettes and dry squids. He couldn't think of anything else he might need besides a hemp rope and some small circular key rings for this trip. Láo was about to get his first leash ever.
“Are you excited, man?” - Nhân padded his back. They walked back to the outpost together as usual, perhaps for the last time in a long time.
It would be understandable if something else, like food and fresh water donations during the monsoon season, poured in from the rest of the nation. After all, people from this part of a tropical country were used to big waves and raging floods. Their homes were built not only to withstand the annual typhoons but to be quickly rebuilt in case of unavoidable collapse due to excessive five-meter-high flooding, sometimes for days. Nature was scary, but it was a part of their mundane lives. Therefore, food and fresh water donations were also expected in life. But this time, they were letters — hand-written letters packing the dock. That was something that the villagers on this medium-sized fishing peninsula in Vietnam would never fathom.
Nhân complained about the last two delivery batches with soaked letters in the bottom of the hemp bags. “How could I make the addresses to sort them out if they’re soaking wet and disintegrating in my hands, man? Put the bags onto something. Your boats are always wet. C’mon, this is paper, man!” - Nhân was yelling at the young messenger. The youngster was a dark-skinned, shirtless teenager running a single-engined delivery boat for quick cash between the peninsula and its surrounding islands.
Nhân took care of the outpost up the road from the dock. Usually, he’d be clinking his keychain to open the outpost’s sole wooden door at 7 AM. He’d then open the weathered green windows with a green metal rod barricade on the same window frame. It seemed excessive for such a thick metal barricade, but that was how Nhân's uncle, the old village's mailman many years ago, built it for safety.
Nhân was a skinny guy in his early 30s, wore a stained red cap, and always had a Hero cigarette in his mouth. He worked in his humble 6 square meter office- the small outpost station with a rusty corrugated roof built slanted to drain rainwater. Usually, he’d be sorting out physical goods in woven plastic bags, cartons, or cheap wood crates, preparing them to be delivered. After sorting, he'd load them onto his weathered white Lambro 550 and drive to each parcel’s final destination. Nhân was a mailman but also took up extra local delivery jobs as needed, especially during quieter days. He got paid by the village’s municipal office with an artificially low daily rate plus a large bag of rice every month, which meant the extra jobs sometimes paid him way more than his main gig.
He was diligent at work but also at complaining about everything in his life. Everything except his brown mud dog Láo. This dog was his best friend and a diligent second-hand smoker. So naturally, Láo followed Nhân everywhere, even to work. Láo was there, rainy or sunny. Work sometimes was so slow that without Láo, Nhân would think he might die of boredom. Nhân would never consider one day, his good old outpost, in yellow with a white anti-fungal paint line across the bottom of its four outside walls, would take in just so many letters.
As he loaded another batch of the letter bags on a big wheelbarrow from the dock to the sorting table at the outpost, Láo ran ahead of him. He mumbled the morning away, “At this rate, I can't do this alone anymore. You gotta step up and load some for me, man.” Everyone and everything was a man to Nhân. “You eat, now you work. You start tomorrow, ok man?” He told Láo. With a half-burnt cigarette dangling between his dry lips, Nhân could barely catch a breath between his complaining. His tan honeycomb sandals tore a little more every day.
—
Five months ago, a massive wave of dead fish flooded the shore of this village. It happened almost overnight. The affected shoreline spanned not only this village alone but four nearby. That was a very long cove to see a sight of just dead, stinky fish upon more dead, smelly fish. People didn't understand why. As far as they knew, there were no official reports about oil leaks or natural disasters during the season. Yet, so many dead fish were seen in the helicopter's video, even when filmed in a tropical morning rain, people could see a glistening, thick silver line of fish carcasses on the beach instead of the usual light brown sand.
The government sent waves of young foot soldiers and navy crews, alongside volunteered locals, to clean up their shores and cook for the workforce. The area’s sea pollution level significantly affected a colossal corporation’s seafood production. The government was forced to intervene, and intervene fast! Ultimately, that turned out to be a good factor, or else the help wouldn't come as quickly as it did.
This news was on TV every day for about three weeks. Compared to just ten years ago, when power was scarce enough, some places in this village, like the outpost, would not have lightbulbs. TVs then were great but not necessary. However, the villagers had lately fashioned their households with decent TVs in recent years, all possible thanks to vast power lines arriving in the region. All the small warehouses and the main market stalls had glaring white LED bulbs. But considering how rarely they needed the outpost to function at night, it never required a shining bulb. That was until recently.
The villagers had never seen big boxy cameras and many reporters in their town. Nhân was one of many volunteered locals who cleaned up the beach. The mail outpost became a sleeping tent for the chief, while other soldiers would stay in large, dark green tents erected around clear grounds or crash at some locals’ homes. They set up more lightbulbs and electric lines because of that. Nhân said he couldn't eat fish for maybe another year after that. The stinkiness was probably still in his throat until much later. It was on the news the whole time. But after about three weeks and some odd days, the ASEAN football tournament began, sweeping all national spotlights and replacing the then-forgotten dead fish story. People moved on so quickly.
During those “spotlight" weeks, there was one particular night. As Nhân was locking up his micro-truck and left the key with the chief that stayed in his empty outpost, he whistled for Láo to come home with him. Pour Láo couldn't even stand the smell sometimes. He'd sniff and sometimes gag at the dead fish. He wouldn't eat them anymore after getting screamed at by his owner at the beginning of the first cleaning week. That night he kept looking out to shore rather than rushing home before Nhân's steps like usual. Láo finished his typical food, drank water, and fell asleep soundly. But Nhân couldn't sleep.
He could see down the hill from his tiny house’s window. The lighthouse where his friend Toàn lived and worked was on the far left of his vantage point. Closer was the yellow outpost, which recently got a shining single light bulb installed by the front yard, hooked on a tall plastic rod for the soldiers to gather and have dinner, spreading the food on some newspapers right on the ground. The chief joined his crew, and they seemed to talk about something hilarious. Or at least the soldiers laughed at the chief's joke like it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. It was late, but because they'd get a half-day off tomorrow after a long eight days of hard labor uninterrupted, the small group didn't just crash on their beds like usual. But closer to midnight, the people got quieter.
Soon, the yard was empty, and they turned off the blinding cold white light bulb. The outpost was just the same silhouette of darkness with the ground under the fragile sickle moonlight. Nhân was still awake. He lit another cigarette just because he was looking for nothing. Láo was sleeping next to his foot. At first, it was a blink. He thought it might be a weird glare from the cigarette's orange tip. But it wasn't. This light was faintly green. A slight blink of green light turned on, much like a flashlight. And then it was off. Was somebody patrolling the beach? Or maybe it was a reflection from the lighthouse - He wasn't sure. Twenty minutes later, it happened again. This time the blinking lights were just as bright. But it blinked slowly enough that Nhân couldn’t doubt its existence anymore. Slow, irregular blinks of deep green light from the same spot down the shore. Was it Morse code? Again, he wasn't sure. The light was blinking faintly, fading to dark and lighting up as slowly as someone’s sleeping breaths. Nhân decided to make his way down to the dock. Much to his surprise, Láo didn't wake up to the sounds of Nhân leaving the bed like usual. Nhân stroked his dog’s head lightly, petting his sticky back. He was still asleep soundly, and his breath was slower than the blinking light.
Nhân walked down the hill, a silver battery flashlight and a small kitchen knife in his back pocket. He wasn't sure what it was and couldn't be too careful. After all, it was way past midnight, with more strange people in town than ever. He didn't go on the dock but turned before that, walking down the sandy path. He approached the last stone step barefoot and went into an area that was only cleared of dead fish since yesterday afternoon. The sand's color, or any color, was grey with a hint of the blueish moonlight gleaming on the open sea. He realized the tides were way higher recently than five years ago, for instance.
The green flicking light still seemed so far away from shore. People would have to be on a boat to go that far at this hour. Nhân felt an uneasy wind stirring up all of a sudden. The kind of quiet wind, but it’d shake enough leaves to wake someone up in the middle of a silent night. What is its purpose, and who is it trying to communicate with?- Nhân failed to come up with a possible theory. He wondered for a split second that maybe the light was for him. But if it were, he wouldn’t be so lost like that.
The wind picked up more, and the green light slowly caught up with the wind’s speed. Nhân saw the tall palm trees behind him, flustered like a storm was coming despite a very calm night. He walked closer to the water, trying to make something from the flickering source. His sight glued on the green light. He stepped on something wet amid all the drier sand around. By then, the wind got so loud; it blew his hair all over. Nhân touched the bottom of his toe, and he realized it was slimy. He thought it might be another fish carcass that they left behind. Nhân picked up the tiny thing he stepped on: roundish, soft, slimy, and it ensembled an imperfect marble. He took out the flashlight and lit the marble in his hand. It was an oddly fresh fish eyeball covered in sand. Nhân could only see this transparent, bulging eye like this from a live or freshly caught fish. It was bizarre enough to see such a lonely, deserted fish eye on the beach, detached from a fish head, left alone that it was from an infamous extensive graveyard of fish for days then.
Not knowing what to do with the fish eye in his hand, Nhân turned off his flashlight and threw it back to the ocean - where it came from presumably. He paused and realized immediately that the green light had disappeared. He waited for it to return, sitting on the stinky sand beneath. He lit some cigarettes but forgot to smoke most of them. It never came back. He felt incredibly lonely, as if he went to a destined meeting just to find out that the person he'd supposed to meet just never showed up or had already left. They missed each other entirely, leaving such a longing ache for the unanswered.
Many nights after, he tried to stay up late and waited for the same green light. Unfortunately, it never resurfaced or gilded its reflection on the ocean’s midnight again.
—
Finally, there was one.
Many letters came to this peninsula recently, oddly without specific recipient names. Instead, they were all addressed to house numbers and road names, available in yellow books and public records that people could easily find.
According to the National Centre for Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting, a piece of developing national news just under two weeks ago talked extensively about the possibility that the peninsula and surrounding islands in this area might face disappearance due to a historically significant hurricane coming their way. All the villages in the dead fish incident from a while back would be directly under threat because they belonged to the same shore. The forecast was following a developing ocean storm from the Pacific Ocean. This coming Category 7 tropical depression could develop into a deadly hurricane. According to this gloomy prediction, its destruction could submerge most of the peninsula altogether. A gradual rise in temperature of the area, thus a rise in sea level, which began way before the hurricane, added to this cause.
This flooding might be one of the worst ones they'd ever known. A mandatory evacuation had been the talk of the town. Many speculations took place for if or when this might happen.
“And where will we go, man?” - Nhân complained to Toàn about this possible sudden change. He flickered his cigarette hand to rid the ash.
“I’ll call their bluff, to be honest with you" - Toàn spat on the ground and sipped his Foster beer. “They won't give us any money, and they want us to just move to the mainland? To where, Vũng Tàu? I won't leave my lighthouse for shit".
“The only people who don't take it seriously are on this land. Everyone else is dead worried about us. Didn't you see the news or read any of your letters? You got the most letters out of all of us. Damn, man, I'm tired of reading The LightHouse, Penin 1. Just cuz you got the fanciest address, m'kay?!”
Nhân made an amusing observation but ended up sounding like he was slightly jealous of Toàn’s popularity with letter writers. And Láo was asleep soundly on the concrete floor beneath their blue plastic table full of Foster beers and yellow deadly spicy Vietnamese beef jerky. The afternoon soon faded to dark.
The letters came from people who felt an incredible connection to this piece of sob story on the news. “The villagers face homelessness and immediate relocation,” “A refugee wave is coming to the mainland due to a historic storm this season."
Nhân didn't know how to take the letter that came this morning. It was the first one ever addressed to Mailman, Penin 1. A very vague person was compelled enough to write a letter to whoever that was this village’s mailman. This person explained that they understood what the mailman might be going through, losing hope and losing a home, that they were here to help with anything, and that they were sending love. While Toàn - the lighthouse guy - even had someone offering him a place to stay in District 8, although it came all the way from Saigon, and Toàn wouldn't even know how to get to Saigon. For them both, Saigon was so far, it might as well belong to fiction.
Compared to that, Nhân's sole letter was very modest, but he felt a strange familiarity reading someone's handwriting. Something was homey about that. It felt like he was hearing from a distant relative or a childhood friend, both of whom he’d lost touch with for so many years, and they finally found him in the end, that they'd be there to reassure help if he ever needed it.
After the talk, Nhân drove home from the lighthouse. He kept thinking about his letter the whole way home. Nhân imagined what the face of this person might look like. The writer mentioned that he was in his late twenties, and his dad had worked for the local post office his whole life. He would have loved to become a mailman, but the financial need was a constant worry for his family since he was born. So he'd become a salaryman in sales instead. He felt compelled to write to someone like Nhân to follow a national trend and send love this way. After signing his name, the man scribbled his telephone number to call after 5 pm, in case Nhân got relocated to his city.
They got home after dark and rolled on to bed soon after. Láo had been climbing up Nhân's single bed every night for the recent month - something Láo had never done since he was a puppy. He always preferred the ground, right next to Nhân's bed. Láo woke up way more in the middle of the night, jumped down and sniffed away everything in the house, then went back to bed. Since the green light night, Nhân hadn't slept that easy either. Something had corroded his good night’s sleep, bit by bit. He often thought to himself, questioning himself if that green light happened, if he went to the beach and stepped on that fish eye, or if it was just a weird dream that he remembered vividly.
Despite the strange events this year, Nhân didn't think much until the first forecasting news was broadcasted two weeks ago. After that, he kept waiting for something to happen. Then, this week with the letters, he wondered if what he'd been waiting for might be coming soon.
The morning came rather at a slow pace. The letters still came that day to the dock, but it was a different volume than last week. Nhân felt a slight relief from that.
“Guess you never had to step up, huh, Láo? You lucky man!”
In the afternoon, Nhân finished his glass of lukewarm jasmine tea before closing the outpost early. People gathered at the village’s municipal office to hear from the village's chief. Everyone got the same worrying face. In the courtyard, they set up a pair of tall speakers. The chief reached the podium with a stack of important-looking papers. Nhân stood so close to the front that he could glance at the red stamp marks, usually seen on government announcements.
“Hello, everyone! Thank you for being here. First, I want to say that we have been in constant communication with the mainland, and this will need everyone's utmost cooperation.”
The chief explained that per instructions from “the mainland," which meant the province, the village would undergo a mandatory evacuation this week. The first minute of his speech was met with loud murmurs in the crowd. People were yelling all their concerns out loud, ranging from their houses, gardens, stockpiles, storages, vehicles, and animals.
Láo was wagging his tail to all the noises and many people surrounding him. He thought it might be a party.
The chief seemed to understand why people might oppose this idea rather than seeing the severity of their fates. He calmly continued,
“To be honest, I asked the province’s head office. They said that our situation is dire. Relocating is our last resort. More detailed plans are in motion, how we'll move as groups and how we'll eat. If nothing changes, we will leave in two days. So I advise everyone to go home and start packing up. Pack light, and store the leftovers up high! It might not be as bad as the weatherman said, but I don't know. We don't know. If it turns out, in the end, to be better than expected, we will return in no time. If not, we'd be glad that we’d left.”
So it was final. The villagers were told to return tomorrow at around the same time to receive food stamps and hear more from the chief. Nhân looked at Láo running around to people he knew and wagged hello. Nhân whistled to Láo they needed to go. Worries clouded over his mind.
Nhân looked over and saw Toàn from afar. Toàn shrugged his thin shoulders and sighed visibly. They had nothing to discuss, so Nhân held his hand up to say bye. He headed to the local store, and a long line was already formed. Leaving or not, they’d still need to stock up. It was clear that most of his fellow villagers saw the idea of leaving their homes as foreign as going to America. They’d instead climb up their red china tiles on the roof and stay for days if flooding occurred. Stranded, but they’d rather be stranded at home.
Somehow, Nhân knew it was apparent that there would be no village anymore. He felt that. The thought devastated him so much that he forgot to light a cigarette while standing in line. When it got to his turn, a lot of stuff was already gone. He picked up some cigarettes and dry squids. He couldn't think of anything else he might need besides a hemp rope and some small circular key rings for this trip. Láo was about to get his first leash ever.
“Are you excited, man?” - Nhân padded his back. They walked back to the outpost together as usual, perhaps for the last time in a long time.